The Observing Self, or Writing Upon Something: The Character, Art, and Distinctiveness of the Familiar Essay

Abstract

Some twenty-five years into “the return of/to the essay,” its resurrection and renaissance after a supposed near-death experience around the middle of the past century, Cristina Nehring has put into words what a number of readers now feel: “What’s wrong with the American essay?” Writing on truthdig, an electronic “progressive journal of news and opinion,” in late 2007, Nehring declares that “the essay is in a bad way.”¹ It is not, she claims, “because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized.” Nor is it, she asserts, because “we, as readers … [have become] lazier, less interested, less educated.” Her comments were occasioned by the twentieth installment of the successful and influential series Best American Essays, founded by Robert Atwan, who continues to serve as series editor. Those volumes, according to Nehring, languish in the basement of the local library, “where they’ll sit—with zero date stamps—until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out. That is the fate of the essay today.”